Multi-homed networks are often connected to the Internet through several Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Multi-homed networks are advantageous if one of the connections to an ISP fails. Each ISP assigns an IP address (or range of them) to a company. As soon as a router assigned to connect to that ISP determines that the connection is lost, it will reroute all data through one of the other routers. In order to decrease operational costs and improve on network reliability and performance, however, multi-homed networks require bandwidth management and control. Bandwidth management and control typically involves managing bandwidth usage rates (also known as bandwidth rates) by considering bandwidth usage rate limitations (limits). These limitations include capacity limits, physical limits or contracted bandwidth limits (e.g., flat rate or 95th percentile).
In such multi-homed networks, bandwidth usage rates must be managed for each provider interface within a group of provider interfaces (two or more provider interfaces that form a group for bandwidth balancing). A provider interface is a hardware part of a router or network device designated for connection with an Internet Service Provider's router or other hardware as known to those skilled in the art. Bandwidth usage rates may require balancing across two or more provider interfaces within a provider interface group for improving network efficiency, reliability and costs. The typical answer or solution for managing bandwidth rates is to manually reroute some network prefixes carrying a specific amount of bandwidth to other provider interfaces. However, this task is too complex and time consuming when it must be performed on an ongoing or periodic basis.
It would thus be advantageous to provide a system and method that will overcome the problems described above.